I was born on August 20, 1986, which happens to be the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month.
There are four ghost festivals in China, namely March 3rd, Tomb-Sweeping Day, July 15th, and October 1st. Tomb-Sweeping Day and October 1st are all about sweeping tombs and worshiping ancestors, expressing "respect for the times" to ancestors and relatives.
", a festival to offer sacrifices and express grief. March 3rd is popular in the Jianghuai and Jiangnan areas. Legend has it that ghosts will appear on this day. But on July 15th (in some places it is July 14th), the Six Paths come out and the gate of ghosts opens.
Lonely souls and wild ghosts wander around, which is the day when the Yin Qi is at its strongest.
Of course, these are all folklore, and you don’t have to believe them. However, this day is not only a folk Ghost Festival, but also a Taoist Ghost Festival, and a Buddhist Obon Festival. There is a certain reason for its specialness.
I studied early and was only sixteen years old after graduating from high school, one to two years younger than my average classmates. This is not because I am precocious, but because there are few students in primary schools in remote areas and I don’t care much about the age of admission.
It also caused me to be ignorant when I took the college entrance examination. As a result, I failed the exam and left the society early.
I came out to work in 2002. People outside are like duckweeds, wandering everywhere. In the past 7 years, I have been to many places, including Yiwu in Zhejiang, Foshan in Guangdong, Zhongshan, Dongguan, Zhuhai, and Shenzhen. I have worked in factories.
I have been a general worker, foreman, deputy supervisor, set up a street stall and sold fruit, worked as a chef in a Western-style pizza shop, and also worked as a steel bar worker, insurance, salesperson, and furniture seller on a construction site for a period of time... in 2005
At that time, I was deceived by a fellow villager and went to Hefei to work as a pyramid schemer for a month.
When I was the poorest, I only ate two steamed buns in three days. When I was the richest, I owned two houses and a small car in Dongguan City.
People who stay in one place all year round and in a small circle have no stories, only desires. But a person who has been wandering around in a foreign land for a long time and has seen all kinds of life will have many stories. For example, the romantic encounters that the masses love to hear about, such as
The dark side of society, such as various anecdotes about strange people, such as... Xingdu Dongguan ("All the Way to the West" seems to be very popular now, in fact, many things in it should have been collected by the screenwriter himself, many places
They are all very real.)
There are many stories worth telling, but I still want to talk about a turning point in my life first.
At the end of August 2007, my grandmother became seriously ill.
I was a co-owner of a jewelry store in Dongguan and went home immediately after receiving the news.
At that time, I already had my own private car, a blue Passat. But because I was not familiar with the road conditions, I transferred to a long-distance sleeper car that went directly to our county. However, I did not expect at the time that I would take the same road as before.
Completely different life paths.
My hometown is located in the southwest, an ethnic minority area, bordering Xiangxi to the east and the gateway to the Shiwan Mountains.
When talking about Xiangxi, some people will think of the ancient city of Fenghuang in Mr. Shen Congwen's "Border Town", some will think of Huaihua, the transportation city that connects the north and the south. Of course, some will also think of corpse extermination, poison poisoning and bandits in western Hunan.
In terms of region, our place is actually part of the cultural and folk custom radiation circle of western Hunan.
For example, bandits. Comrades who have read "The Suppression of Bandits in Western Hunan" may be able to imagine where we live: poor mountains, bad water, and unruly people. Of course, the main problem is that the mountains are high, the roads are dangerous, the transportation is poor, and there are so many people and so little land.
Poor. Before liberation, many mountain people there used to take care of the land and livestock with hoes and sickles during the day. After sharpening their knives at night, they went to rob roads.
They usually dig for food in the soil and are farmers who can't beat a fart with three sticks. When they robbed the world, they were the imps of King Yama.
This is a profession and a habit.
This is a profession and a habit.
Another example is poison. Some people say that this is feudal superstition. Well, let’s call it feudal superstition, because before I was twenty-two years old, like many comrades who were educated by the party and state, I was a materialist and not a materialist.
I believe that there are ghosts, zombies, and messy and weird things in this world.
Although there are many such legends in our family, even though my grandmother is a voodoo breeder.
In the ignorant old China, especially in remote places, there were many uneducated people. The controllers and disseminators of knowledge were often religious figures, such as Taoism, Buddhism, Shamanism... and the primitive religions of many ethnic minorities.
These people are the spreaders of religion. My grandmother is the goddess of the Miao village.
Miao witchcraft combines a lot of magic, traditional Chinese medicine, and witch medicine. There are some merits and some incredible things. The most criticized thing is drinking talisman water and using chicken blood on a special yellow paper.
They were scrawled with ink mixed with cinnabar, rice soup and other things. Finally, they were burned and the remaining ashes were mixed with water to drink.
The impression I have of my grandmother is that of a skinny little old lady with a stern smile, a nose like a hook, a toothless mouth, and a slumped face. She is now over 80 years old and has lived in Miao Village all her life, specializing in reading incense (fortune-telling) to people.
), cure diseases, exorcise ghosts and read Feng Shui. Neighbors and villagers from all over the country still respect her very much.
My mother told me that my grandma was suffering from cancer. It was late-stage gastric cancer and it was probably incurable.
It was already 7 o'clock in the evening when the sleeper car arrived at the county town. There are no buses in the remote county. On weekdays, the latest minibus that travels between the town and the county town is 5:30 pm. I looked for one in a hurry.
After bargaining with the driver in a shabby taxi, we finally arrived in the town where my home is located two hours later.
No one picked me up, so I went home by myself. The last time I went home was at the beginning of 2005 when I just ran back from the MLM den in Hefei. In the blink of an eye, two years had passed. And I was an empty-handed boy at that time.
Became a little wealthy.
My mother took my luggage and told me that my grandmother was not here and had gone back to Dunzhai.
She said she wanted to die in Dunzhai, the land where she had lived for eighty-six years. The well water there was sweet, the rice was fragrant, and even the wind smelled of rape flowers.
My mother has two younger sisters, one younger brother, and she is the eldest sister. My grandfather died early and left at the time when the Four Olds were broken. My grandmother was not very good at housework, so the older mother always had to work harder.
Later, my two aunts got married one after another, and my brother-in-law grew up, so he and my father moved to the town to start a small business.
A few years ago, my brother-in-law made a lot of money and moved to the city.
Grandma refused to leave, so she lived alone in the Miao village called Dunzhai. She was always in good spirits, and there were people in the village helping to take care of her, so there was no need to worry. Unexpectedly, she was actually ill now, and
Or stomach cancer, which is a terminal disease.
I went to Dunzhai with my mother early the next morning.
This used to be a dirt road up the mountain, but it was opened to traffic in 2004, so I chartered a van to go there. Needless to say, the journey was bumpy. It took more than half an hour, and we finally arrived at Dunzhai. Before we even entered the village, I saw
Go to the huge old locust tree in the middle of the village, the drum tower, the grain drying field and the temple and dojo at the end.
I carried some gifts and followed my mother towards the village. The road was dirt and the weather was dry and dusty. People kept saying hello to my mother. My mother responded with a sad face and was worried.
I saw my grandmother again, and at that time her life had entered its final moments.
There were many people gathered in the old house. Except for my aunt who was far away in Karamay, Xinjiang, most of my relatives had returned. I met my second aunt, my brother-in-law, several cousins, and others. Grandma was carrying me.
Yang was lying in Yang's bedroom. When I walked in, I smelled a musty smell. I felt sour in my heart. Grandma is a clean person, but she is also an old person after all.
Mother said: "Mom, Lu Zuo came to see you!"
Inside the yellowed quilt was an old lady who was in her final years. Her hair was snow-white, her skin was like aged pine bark, her face was covered with black and yellow age spots, her eyes were dull, and there was some drool in her crooked mouth.
She is completely unconscious. This is my grandmother, an old man who is close to death.
I held her chicken-foot-like hand, but she didn't react at all. After a while, she glanced at me and fell asleep again.
My mother said to me: "I can no longer recognize people." She shook her head and sighed.
I stayed in Dunzhai for two days, and grandma was in a state of confusion and never woke up. Several relatives were discussing whether to send grandma to the city hospital for treatment, but they could not reach a unified opinion. My brother-in-law said that he should respect grandma.
Please don’t go back and forth. His family’s conditions are not good, and he has already spent a lot of money on his grandmother’s illness.
At this time, one of my cousins who was taking care of my grandma ran to the main room and said that grandma was awake and asked us to come over.
"Are you Lu Zuo?" Grandma looked at me while lying on the bed with drowsy eyes. I nodded, and she asked again: "When were you born?" My mother interjected: "Zuo was born in 1986, 20 years old.
One." Grandma shook her head with difficulty and asked again: "When was she born...month."
"August 20th, the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month." I said.
Suddenly, grandma's eyes lit up, and then she coughed loudly, and there seemed to be phlegm in her chest. I patted her back, and after a few minutes, she finally spit out a mouthful of thick black phlegm. Then she raised her head and said, "Master
, you are finally here."
Grandma suddenly felt much better, and she could actually get out of bed. She directed her uncle to dig out a small clay jar in an open space behind the house. On top of the jar's mouth was the thick oil paper used to make umbrellas earlier.
Along with the jar, a wooden box was unearthed, which contained a thick thread-bound book with yellowed pages.
The grandmother pushed away her daughter to support her, and came tremblingly to the low coffee table with the clay jar. She muttered Miao dialect, and waved her hands tremblingly. After this for about ten minutes, she suddenly
Zi opened the oil paper.
It was dark inside, and after a while, a golden silkworm chrysalis crawled out.
This silkworm chrysalis is fat and fleshy, almost as big as an adult's thumb. Its eyes have degenerated into black spots. There are dozens of pairs of legs on the plump body, and two pairs of wings as soft as paper are attached to it. I
Staring at the black spot on its head, I didn't feel it was plump and cute at all, but felt a strange light coming from it.
Grandma was still reciting vague Miao dialect. I had never learned it, so I couldn’t understand it.
However, her hand suddenly pointed at me.
The silkworm chrysalis turned into a golden thread, and suddenly got into my mouth amidst the exclamations of the people next to me.
My throat felt cold and I felt something flowing down my throat and into my stomach.
Then a fishy smell swirled in my esophagus. I suddenly felt that breathing became particularly difficult, as if my lungs had been eaten away. There seemed to be a missing piece in my heart and an extra organ in my body. With this fishy smell,
My body was churning, and the overwhelming feeling of nausea grabbed all my thoughts. My scalp felt numb for no reason, and I passed out.
Grandma died the day after she woke up.
She walked very peacefully, held my hand and told me many things. She said that the food she gave me yesterday was called Golden Silkworm Gu, which is the king of Gu. It can prolong life, strengthen the body, and has many uses.
But because I stayed in the voodoo box for too long, it became poisonous. On the first and fifteenth day of every month, and at twelve o'clock in the morning, when the toxin is involved, there will be heartbreaking pain. If you want to detoxify, you can only find a short mule.
hat grass to eat.
Grandma also told me that this Golden Silkworm Gu is alive. If I can't conquer it within a year, I will definitely die. "If you don't enjoy the life of the Golden Silkworm Gu, come down and stay with me." In addition to the Golden Silkworm Gu,
Grandma also left me a book called "The Twelve Methods of Suppressing the Mountains", a shabby handwritten book.
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